Archivist of the Tower

The Archivist of the Tower is the supreme custodial office of The Tower, vested with final authority over the classification, retention, and physical ordering of all holdings above and below the Concordance Line. The office is not to be confused with its administrative arm, the Office of the Archivist, nor with the separate Office of the Archivist-General, whose jurisdiction runs only to the functional corridors. The Archivist holds the office for life, or for such portion of a life as the Concordance of Tenure recognizes, and is addressed in writing as "the Archivist, whose name is presently in order."

Origin and codification

The title was first codified in the Yester-Tower year 4987, though the Fourth Concordance asserts that an Archivist had been "informally present" for some eleven centuries prior and that the codification merely regularized a practice already old. The Office of the Archivist dates its continuous register from that codification and counts its incumbents accordingly; the register is closed to inspection above the ninth landing of the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire.

Succession is by designation of the outgoing Archivist, confirmed by the Librarians in a proceeding called the Aperture Reading, at which the nominee's name is read aloud into the Office of the Cartographer-Archivist's register of vocalized identifiers. The reading must occur in a room containing no more than one door. Since Tower Year 11,204 the doors have been counted twice.

Powers and instruments

The Archivist's principal instrument is the seal of the Fifth Concordance, which authenticates holdings and, when applied to a floor, fixes that floor's number for a period of one hundred years. Numbers fixed by seal are not subject to the ordinary drift described in On the Numbering of Floors. The Archivist may also issue Clarifications, short documents that resolve ambiguity in the Concordances without amending them; a Clarification is binding until it is read, at which point it becomes a precedent and must be reissued.

"The Archivist does not amend the Concordances. The Archivist advises them, and they decline."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex 2

The office carries certain small privileges that have never been revoked and are, by custom, exercised weekly: the right to a lamp that is not counted against the floor's allowance, and the right to decline an inventory.

Notable incumbents

Archivist-Luminary Valen held the office from Tower Year 8,301 to 8,511 and is remembered for the Valen Reckoning, a revision of the office's own calendar that was later reversed and then partially restored. Senior Archivist Aethelred never held the supreme office, but served three Archivists as Keeper of the Register and is frequently cited in disputes about the office's continuity. Archivist-Loremaster Valerius contributed the doctrine of clasticity to the Tower's theoretical corpus, though he held the office for only eleven days, having been confirmed in a room with two doors.

Archivist-Proctor Silas served the Spire from 1129 to 1174 Tower Reckoning in a capacity subordinate to the office; the confusion arising from his title is addressed in the Concordance of Styles, which distinguishes the Archivist from all proctors, provisional archivists, and archivists-in-residence by the phrase "the Archivist, singular, whose seal is round." The seals of subordinate offices are oval.

Disputed questions

Scholars disagree sharply on whether the Archivist may vacate the office. The Third Concordance holds that the Archivist serves "until the shelves are satisfied," a condition generally read as perpetual. The Ninth Concordance, drafted some four centuries later, holds that the Archivist may retire upon reaching a floor they have not previously visited, and that the retirement takes effect at the moment of arrival. No Archivist has attempted this since Archivist-Proctor Vela, who descended eleven floors in the winter of Tower Year 14,009 and was met at the twelfth by a delegation explaining that the floor had been renumbered in transit.

A second dispute concerns whether the Archivist outranks the Office of the Chief Archivist, which manages the archival corpus. The Concordance of Precedence places the Archivist above the corpus and the corpus above the OCL, but notes in a marginal hand that the question "has been settled in favor of both."

Vacancy and the interregnum register

Between the death or departure of an Archivist and the Aperture Reading, the office is held by no one, and its functions are exercised by the senior Keeper of the Register under the Interregnum Protocol of 6,442. The Protocol requires that during a vacancy no new floor be sealed, no holding be reclassified, and no one be told the Archivist has died. The longest recorded interregnum lasted nineteen years and three months, during which the office's lamp was kept lit and the inventory was declined thirty-one times.

Visitors during an interregnum are asked to sign the register and to refrain from asking after the Archivist directly. The register is kept at the Office of the Archivist and may be consulted on the ninth landing, weather permitting.